


Sleep Does Not Pretend

by Pygmy Puff (ppuff)



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Fix-It, Gen, Post-Barricade, Watching Someone Sleep
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-26
Updated: 2014-04-26
Packaged: 2018-01-20 19:46:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1523342
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ppuff/pseuds/Pygmy%20Puff
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Instead of leaving Rue de L'Homme Armé for the Seine, Javert waits around, still intending to arrest Jean Valjean. When Valjean doesn't emerge after a long while, Javert goes looking for him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sleep Does Not Pretend

**Author's Note:**

> A short little fic to capture a quiet moment between two exhausted men after a strange, long day.

**_Rue de L’Homme Armé, No. 7_ **

Javert berates himself for his moment of weakness. Why did he allow Valjean to go home? Why had he dismissed the fiacre? And why, most of all, is he standing outside while he allows the criminal to enter, unguarded, into his own house?

 _Valjean will not flee_ , his mind tells him, _or he would have disappeared the moment after he deposited the boy at his grandfather’s house._

 _Or he would have killed you_.

This bigger truth stares uncomfortably down at Javert, and he fidgets, shifting his weight from foot to foot as if each movement can make the reality of why he is still alive less horrifying.

He waits.

For the first ten minutes, he supposes Valjean needs a change of clothing. Another ten minutes, he thinks perhaps Valjean is leaving instructions to his portress, if he has one. When half an hour has past, however, Javert begins to doubt his firm conviction that Valjean has not already escaped.

Suppressing indignation rising in him (and entirely ignoring sentiments like disappointment and—is that _hope_ for wanting Valjean to have disappeared?), Javert lets himself through the unlocked door and stalks with quiet steps up the stairs. The top of the stairs leads only to one area, and that one area, into a sitting room.

There, sprawled across a couch, is Jean Valjean.

He is asleep.

Valjean is exhausted. As he should be, after spending a sleepless night at the barricades and then carrying the full weight of a half-dead boy through the sewers. Standing here, listening to Valjean’s soft snores, Javert suddenly feels very tired himself. His wrists and neck and inner thighs burn, ghost sensations of where the rope had tied him up not a full day ago. His own sleepless night crashes over him like a wave. His head screams, sharp stakes pounding pain deep into his skull. He doesn’t care to take a pinch of snuff to dull the throbbing. It won’t make a difference anyway. He feels too tired to even exist.

This isn’t only the weariness of the past day. No, he is being crushed by the weight of two full decades of history between Inspector Javert and Jean Valjean. Twenty years of meeting and then hunting down one man. He has never imagined it would end like this, the convict slumbering as if he has not a care in the world while he, the righteous follower of the Lord, can barely support himself on feet and knees that are about to give out. The very bones of his body ache.

With great effort, Javert approaches the couch until he is close enough to see the lines on Valjean’s face. In the fading light of dusk, Valjean’s white hair glows a blinding silver against his other features, and Javert is convinced that the hair is really a halo in disguise. He doesn’t turn his eyes away, _can’t_ , for he has never seen anything like this before: this is the sleep of an unburdened man.

In sleep, Valjean is free. The lines on his face have smoothed out, and he seems more like the man Javert knew in Montreuil-sur-Mer, always placid and peaceful, without the constant shadow of a fugitive in hiding. Valjean looks almost innocent. Did he look like this in Toulon, when the convict slept? No, he couldn’t have. The sleep of convicts is fitful and dreamless at best, overworked bodies parked on hard planks, a merciless, cold oblivion that can be interrupted at any time by the screams of a fellow convict waking from his nightmare. Jean Valjean is not sleeping like a convict.

So if not a convict, then who is he?

Montreuil-sur-Mer flashes across his mind’s eyes as Javert beholds once again the face of Monsieur Madeleine in front of him. During those short few years, Javert had memorized the mayor’s face as he strolled nightly to the docks to give alms while Javert patrolled in the shadows. Then there was the look he couldn’t banish for years, the sheepish blush on Madeleine’s face whenever Javert brought up the numerous incidents of home break-ins that led not to lost property but to monetary gifts of charity and, sometimes, to damaged locks and doors. He remembers Madeleine treating him no differently than how he related to everybody: with kindness. Knowing what he knows now, this is even more incredible, that a convict on the run with the power to dismiss Javert from his post would choose to offer goodness over self-preservation. He remembers Madeleine’s smiles.

Madeleine—Valjean—is smiling now. He is content; sleep does not pretend.

This is the man that Javert has hunted across the years. A harmless, content, and—dare he say— _changed_ man.

Javert turns his eyes away from the smile before it might do something like arouse regret in him. He shifts his mind to consider Valjean’s pathetic state of dishabille. He has managed to strip himself of his necktie and waistcoat before succumbing to sleep. An attempt to rid himself of the filth of the sewers, no doubt. Thus uncovered, Javert can see the marks of where cold iron once gripped his neck, and something inside him seizes as he feels the urge to cover Valjean, to bury the convict back into the skin of the gentleman. To the world, Jean Valjean the convict is no more. Let the dead stay dead.

Sleep does not lie; he sleeps as a man, not as a beast of Toulon.

And this man…

Javert considers their past, of what he knows about the many sides of Jean Valjean. They had known each other through the distortion of hatred and mistrust. These sentiments have defined them over the years, welding Javert and Jean Valjean into a too-tall barricade wobbling on mismatched pieces—fed by Javert’s unwillingness to see Valjean as a man and festering under Valjean’s constant fear from someone whom he sees as the very personification of the Law. Their lives make a peculiar barricade, full of awkward parts that don’t quite fit together, parts that seem to undermine the integrity of the structure. But take away one piece, and this barricade won’t appear as it ought to be.

Their lives are inextricably intertwined, cosmic joke that it is. Perhaps this is why Valjean had let him go free at the barricades, and why Javert now hesitates to arrest Valjean.

Javert wonders if their past could have been different and realizes that it is too late. The barricade is falling down, tipping over like the Tower of Babel, crumbling like the walls of Jericho. The fallen pieces are called pride and anger, deadly sins that poison the skin they pierce and break the bones they crush. All Javert can do is to helplessly endure, unable to lift a finger to shield himself from the bitterness rising in him of his years spent chasing, hunting, obsessing.

Jean Valjean sleeps peacefully on.

Perhaps if he walks away, things will go back to normal. Then he can return again tomorrow, when the barricade of their intermingled lives will be cleared away like the fallen barricades out on Paris’ streets that are even now being dismantled, and then he will be able to arrest Valjean.

His feet refuse to obey and his eyes are unable to tear away. What does tomorrow matter? What will five days, ten? After having his life spared at the barricades, he knows he will always reach but one conclusion: He _cannot_ arrest Valjean.

Not when the face before him is so filled with peace, an expression that Javert has never seen on himself whenever he catches his own reflection in the mirror. This is a peace borne out of goodness rooted deep in the soul, where love has banished fear and radiant light has chased away all whispers of nightmares. He knows this look only in the beatific smile of the parish priest and in the gentle curve of the backs of the sisters at the orphanage. It is the mark of God reserved for those whom he loves. Javert does not fully comprehend it, but it appears that Jean Valjean has earned divine approval while he himself has sought the same for so long, in vain, through the pursuit of justice and righteous deeds.

He lets out a deep breath. It is decided, then. Valjean lives. And he… dies.

It all makes so much sense.

He must have exhaled too loudly, for the air around them changes, and Javert starts. Instinct snaps his body upright. He takes two steps backward to lengthen the distance between them.

Valjean is stirring.

Sleep-clouded eyes open and Javert loses himself in the kindness there (there is always kindness in those eyes), before Valjean’s mind clears enough to realize at whom he is gazing.

The kindness does not go away.

“Monsieur l’Inspecteur, you’re still here,” Valjean says, apologizes, for making him wait, not questioning why a stranger—or worse, an enemy—is in his house staring at him while he sleeps.

“You are tired,” he addresses the unspoken apology.

Valjean’s lips curve into a smile, a silent agreement of what he is too exhausted to voice with words. The lines crinkling at the corners of his eyes underscore the man’s utter weariness.

“Sleep,” Javert says. It is his turn to apologize with what is unspoken, for intruding. It is also a promise that he will not return again.

Valjean suddenly understands, in the way that surprise first creeps onto his face before it gives way to confusion, then relief.

“Monsieur l’Inspecteur… Javert.” _Thank you_ , Javert hears. He does not acknowledge it. “Be safe, please.”

Valjean must be referring to the post-barricade chaos outside. He bristles. No one should tell him how to do his job, least of all a (former) criminal.

“I know how to protect myself, Valjean.”

“ _Pardonnez-moi,_ Inspector.” Valjean looks chastened, and yet he still presses on, like the mule-headed man that he’s been all his life. The folly of his younger self had led to multiple attempts at escape. Yet his older self is no different, and Javert suddenly sees in him M. Madeleine breaking through doors to bestow charity in his poor citizens’ homes, and Jean Valjean who refuses to stop saving people’s lives, whether prostitute or orphan, revolutionary or a failed policeman who, with his decision to let Valjean go free, has just sentenced himself to death for betraying the law.

“For my sake, then. Perhaps one day you will change your mind and you will come back. And for that, you must be hale to return again.”

Valjean holds his gaze as he speaks, a command if there ever is one, and Javert wonders what he has divulged on his face. He does not care to discuss it with the enigma before him. Not for the first time today, he can no longer tell the saint apart from the galley slave.

He dips his head in a slight bow. “As you wish, Monsieur.” _You have bought my life with your words_ , he does not add. He wonders if Valjean knows. The man before him had at one point been claimed by God—something had happened between Jean Valjean’s release and his arrival at Montreuil-sur-Mer as a changed man. So Valjean should know, must know, that the soul he now owns will forever be under his claim.

But Valjean releases him, gives him back his soul. “Good night, Inspector.” His voice is gentle, and Javert hears in these simple words his exoneration. _There is no debt between us, not anymore._

He leaves, feeling the weight of Valjean’s gaze burning in the back of his head. He is glad of the darkening sky outside. He can no longer claim to be a servant of the Light: let darkness engulf him. And yet his heart feels strangely unburdened. Maybe at the end of the black tunnel, a white-haired saint steeped in sin but yet has kept his soul unblemished will show him how to find peace.

Their lives are inextricably intertwined. If Jean Valjean lives, then Javert must continue to endure his lot in life.


End file.
